


Being Alive

by Stayawhile



Category: Eureka
Genre: Apocalypse, F/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-22
Updated: 2010-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stayawhile/pseuds/Stayawhile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the end of the world as she knows it, and her best friend is a talking house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Being Alive

The door closes, and I can’t stop the noise that comes out of my mouth, strangled and inarticulate and ugly.

“Sheriff Carter will return,” SARAH says confidently. “And I will keep you and Jenna safe. My defensive systems are fully operational.”

I don’t answer. There are no certainties any more. It’s entirely possible that I won’t see Jack again, that eventually SARAH’s systems will break down.

Since last Friday, anything is possible. Well, anything horrible.

Jenna is crying, so I head upstairs.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“Look, I don’t want to have to worry about you and the baby. Please, just stay here.” I focused on his mouth, his chin, not wanting to see fear poisoning the deep blue of his eyes. Henry’s newest weapon had been proven effective, which is the only reason we made it here. Shooting Fargo was hard, but the relief when he didn’t get up again was worse. Of course, it wasn’t really Fargo any more. Henry’s still at GD, locked deep in Section Five with a few other survivors, building more weapons as fast as he can.

“I wish you didn’t have to go out there.” It slipped out. I hadn’t meant to say it. It’s Jack. I know he isn’t capable of staying in a safe place when there might be survivors, might be someone he could rescue.

“I have to.” His voice was steady, the way it always is when he’s putting his life on the line for someone else. I held him close, leaning my head against his uniform, and then angled my head up to kiss him, the way I had wanted to do for years. His mouth is warm and alive and what started out gentle turned passionate and desperate.

Then we heard Jenna’s thin wail from upstairs, and we broke apart, gasping. He held my upper arms, tight enough to bruise.

“Look at me,” he said. I raised my eyes to his, dark and determined and angry. His mouth was set in a flat line.

“I will come back, Allison. Just…have a little faith, okay?” I nodded, knowing that all the words I wanted to say were the wrong ones, the ones that would make this harder for him. Jenna cried out for me again, louder, on the edge of frantic.

“I will.” I knew that if my daughter was out there, nothing could keep me from searching for her. I also knew his chances of finding Zoe alive were…well, not good.

That was seven hours ago.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“SARAH, begin recording. Timestamp, audio only.”

“Starting now, Dr. Blake.”  
 _  
This is Dr. Alison Blake, Director of Global Dynamics. I am making this recording to document my own experiences during the onset of the plague that struck Eureka, in the hope that it…will be useful. Somehow._

Deep breath.

 _

The first sign, though I didn’t know it at the time, was when Jenna’s babysitter didn’t show up. Karen’s utterly reliable, or she was. I called her, then a few more potential backup sitters, but nobody was answering her phone. Finally I just decided to bring her to GD, let Fargo help me take care of her. He’s surprisingly good with her, and actually enjoys babysitting—his face does this incredibly cute thing when he’s babbling with her.

_

“SARAH, pause recording. Can we edit out that last sentence? About Fargo?”

“Certainly. Would you like me to do that now?”

“Yes. No! Wait. Leave it for now. Somebody ought to remember Fargo…as a person.”

“You can choose to edit any part of this recording later, Dr. Blake.”

“Okay. I guess I should just…keep going.”

 _  
I don’t answer my cell when she’s in the car with me, so the first I heard about the mess was when I arrived at GD. Some sort of very strange illness, Dr. Beckett said, you might want to come down and take a look. I was annoyed that Fargo wasn’t around, but now I’m grateful. I took Jenna down to the infirmary and put her in a ‘clean room’ where I could monitor her remotely. At six months, she isn’t crawling yet, but she adores classical music; I dug that old Disney movie, Fantasia, out of the Global database to entertain her, cursing Fargo and Karen and my job._

 _

Things deteriorated pretty fast after that. I did learn a few things.

_

 _The plague is viral. It’s transmitted by skin-to-skin contact. It causes extreme aggression and uncontrollable rage. A very small percentage of the population is immune. The incubation period is less than an hour._

 _The infected are hard to kill. They do not seem to experience pain. They survive injuries that would incapacitate most human beings._

 _Although I am trained as an M.D., my specialty was oncology. This requires a level of expertise in virology and epidemiology that I don’t have. There are people at Global who do, but I have no way of knowing whether they are alive._

 _I managed to barricade myself in the clean room with my daughter. I was afraid to touch her, to pick her up and comfort her, because I didn’t know whether I was infected. Those were the worst two hours of my life. Listening to the fighting outside, the screaming. And then the silence. I kept calling people and getting no answer. Voicemail of the damned._

 _I was rescued by Sheriff Jack Carter. He and Dr. Henry Deacon appear to be immune as well. Dr. Deacon had retreated to a defensible lab in Section Five and had figured out how to modify a prototype energy-beam weapon to kill the infected. Sheriff Carter took one and went to search for other survivors. When my phone rang, I…_

“SARAH, pause recording.”

“SARAH, resume recording.”  
 _  
Thanks to Sheriff Carter, we were able to escape GD and retreat to this bunker. At that point, the outbreak was still confined to Eureka. As far as we knew, anyway. By the time we were locked into the bunker, Eurekanet had crashed and we were cut off. SARAH keeps trying to reroute things, find a link to an outside server, but she hasn’t been succcessful; she believes there is physical damage to the main GD server. The logic diamonds should retain the data stored within them; if they can be retrieved, the information needed to contain the plague may be there._

 _I don’t know if the plague has spread beyond Eureka. I know the electrostatic shield was operating at the time of the outbreak, due to an ongoing experiment, but if…._

“SARAH, stop recording. I can’t...I’ll get back to this later.

“Yes, Dr. Blake.”

=-=-=-=-=-=

I’m just grateful SARAH’s operating system is still running. She’s been a big help, preparing baby food from flash-frozen ingredients in her apparently enormous freezer, playing cartoons for Jenna. Her voice lets me imagine I’m not really alone. Her affect is flatter than usual, and I’m guessing she deactivated whatever program allows her to simulate emotion. When I ask, she confirms it. “I determined that I would be less useful to you in our current situation if that program was not operational.”

Jenna’s fretful, feeling my tension. I lie down in the guest bedroom and sing, mindlessly, the old show tunes my grandmother used to love. I don’t remember half the words, so I fill in with ‘da dee dee dum’ and ‘I love you.’ It’s a good hour before her eyes close and her breathing evens out into sleep, a calm I envy. I move slowly away, but as soon as I stop singing, she shifts restlessly. She relaxes when she hears my voice again, issuing from a speaker in the ceiling. SARAH’s been recording me, it seems. “Thanks, SARAH,” I say softly. The house keeps singing.

I go downstairs and lie on the couch. “You should eat something,” SARAH tells me. “You cannot care for your child unless you maintain your physical health.” I hate the idea that I can be emotionally manipulated by an AI, but she’s right. When I go into the kitchen, part of the counter pops open, and a pot of stew rises into view.  
Suddenly I’m ravenous, and I eat two helpings, trying not to think about anything but chewing, the taste and texture of the beef and vegetables. I guess at the seasonings SARAH uses, and our conversation distracts me for a little while.

I leave half of it for Jack. Faith, I tell myself. I go back to the couch to wait, not expecting to sleep.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I dream about Nathan. But it isn’t really him, only the recording in the logic diamond. His pledge of love is sincere and completely meaningless, since he never says anything different. In the dream, I am in my office (his office), and I can’t stop playing the recording over and over. Everything else in GD is dark, and only Nathan’s voice keeps the ominous noises at bay.

I wake up, startled, with tears on my face.

At least he can’t be infected, I think. He’s already safely dead and gone. He won’t turn into...well, Jack’s calling them zombies, and it’s as good a word as any, I suppose.

I'm glad I sent Kevin to boarding school in Colorado. I hope he never knows what happened here. I wonder if he thinks about me. Maybe it's better if he doesn't.

I wonder if Jack has found Zoe, if she’s alive.

If Jack is alive.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Dr. Blake?”

I push myself up on one elbow. “Sure. And since it’s just the two of us now, you might as well call me Alison.” It’s the end of the world and my closest friend is a talking house.

I could laugh, but I don’t. Part of me knows laughing would push me a little too close to crying, and that could lead to screaming.

Instead, SARAH and I talk about the various types of tea she has on hand.

-=-=-=-=-=-

There’s no clear reason why some of us remained uninfected. It could be an immunity to some related viral strain, antibodies that don’t know the difference between something that makes you feel run-down and tired for a couple of days, and something that destroys your upper brain function and leaves only a mindless impulse to violence. Jack prefers to think it’s a genetic factor, because Jenna and I are both uninfected. It makes it easier to believe that Zoe is immune as well, that his DNA is somehow protecting her.

Whatever it is, I don’t have enough information to do a damned thing about it. I’m used to having resources at my disposal, brilliant scientists and SWAT teams and the world’s most advanced computer system. Now I’ve got a sealed bunker, an AI doing its best to take care of me, and a baby even more helpless than I am. If I’m lucky, I still have Henry too. And Jack.

I wrap my hands around the mug (orange spice, with honey) and take a small sip. There’s a tiny chance that a surviving scientist or two, a microbiologist maybe, is barricaded inside GD and working on a cure. Level three, the virology labs, where I’m pretty sure all this began.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I tiptoe upstairs to check on Jenna. She’s still sleeping peacefully, and I tuck the blanket a little more tightly around her before I sneak away. I’m halfway down the stairs when I hear the door start to open.

“I am pleased to see you, Sheriff Carter,” SARAH says. “Are you injured?”

He shakes his head, standing just in front of the door. He seems stunned, blank. His clothes and his face are filthy, and the gun, the first of Henry’s special guns, droops in his hand, as if it’s too heavy to hold. I silently wrap my arms around him, and we stand there for a long moment. He’s alive, but just barely.

“Not physically,” he manages. “Just…”

He’s alive. Not a zombie. He came back.

-=-=-=-=-=-=

If you asked me to describe Jack at any moment since we met, I’d have come up with a lot of different words. Annoying. Naïve. Friendly. Persistent. Likable. Reliable. Courageous. Sexy. Dangerous. Steadfast.

This would be the first time the world ‘fragile’ ever crossed my mind.

I lead him carefully to the couch, and he sits, staring past me at something I don’t think I ever want to see. SARAH is the first to speak. “I am very pleased that you have returned, Sheriff Carter. Would you like a beer?” He nods, and I head to the kitchen. SARAH tells me, in a near whisper, that he has cuts, bruises, and two cracked ribs, but no internal injuries, and that I should try to get him to eat something. I bring him the beer, and he drinks half of it before setting it down on the coffee table and turning to me.

“Everything okay here?” he asks. “Jenna?” Typical Jack.

“She’s asleep, upstairs. We’re fine,” I reassure him. I put my arm around his shoulders, but he only leans forward, elbows on his knees, head hanging down. His voice is a scratched whisper.

“I found her.” He pauses, and I know better than to speak. “She was…she was infected already. I couldn’t save her. It wasn’t, it… Zoe was gone, and she…”

I tighten my arm around him, but every muscle in his back is screaming tension. “I had to…” Finally he turns to look at me, and his eyes tell me what he had to do, and how badly he is broken. “I had to,” he mutters, and then he’s sobbing in my arms, gasping and choking on his pain. All I can do is hold him, murmuring his name over and over.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

He doesn’t calm down as much as wear himself out. SARAH’s put a box of tissues next to me, and it occurs to me with a pang that Fargo really must have been some kind of AI genius. Jack actually seems to sleep for a while, his head in my lap, his face drawn and greyish. There’s blood in his hair.

When he raises his head, he’s got some semblance of control back. “How about some food?” I ask gently. “SARAH made some stew.”

“Shower first,” he mutters. He stumbles off toward the bathroom, and I wonder if I should go with him, make sure he doesn’t fall. I settle for standing outside the opaque bathroom door, listening and worrying. When he emerges, wearing only a towel, he nods to me, and his mouth twists into something that isn’t quite a smile. My eyes catalog newly acquired scrapes and bruises.

“Jack, would you like to eat?” SARAH asks. He shakes his head. For once, the AI doesn’t push, doesn’t give a clinical analysis based on sensor readings.

I know if he had found anyone alive and uninfected, he would have brought them back to the safety of the bunker. I’m relieved to see him back, and so afraid to ask, afraid to know, afraid the telling of it will destroy what’s left of him. “Maybe after you sleep a little,” I say. He meets my eye briefly, and nods before turning to the stairs, exhaustion in every line of his body. Then he turns back, and reaches out a hand toward me.

“I don’t want to be alone,” he says.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I get him into bed, and let physical exhaustion take over. In a moment, he is snoring softly, and I tiptoe away to check on Jenna. Checking my watch, I’m surprised at how little time has passed since SARAH and I sang her to sleep. The past few hours have felt like years. My girl’s a good sleeper, and she seems content, so I tuck the blanket around her and close the door.

“Alison!” Jack’s shouting, panicked, and I rush down the hall. He’s thrashing, tangled in the sheets. I climb on the bed, putting one hand on his chest.

“I’m here, Jack. I’m here.” It’s the same voice I use to soothe Jenna when she’s fussing, although I can’t bring myself to utter the words ‘it’s okay.’ I repeat myself until he calms, wrapping my arms around him, and he curls into me, clinging.

“Don’t leave me, please.”

“I won’t, Jack.”

=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=

He dozes, and so do I, a little, worn out with worry and comforted by the rise and fall of his chest, warm underneath my cheek.

I am drifting in and out of sleep when I feel his hand on my cheek, caressing. I lift myself up, and without much thought, lean in to kiss him. His lips are a little dry and cracked as he returns the kiss, and suddenly our bodies realize where we are: together, in bed. Jack is naked, the towel lost somewhere under the covers, and he’s warm and alive and strong and real, holding me. The kisses continue, almost frantic, and our hands are everywhere, touching, stroking. I sit up for a moment, tearing away the stupid barrier of my clothes, needing to feel him with every inch of my skin, needing him to touch me everywhere, and he does, he does. The only sound is our breathing, growing faster and harsher, hungry noises that aren’t words, and a long low sigh as he enters me and we begin to move in rhythm. Getting there was fast and desperate, but we lock eyes and things slow, urgency replaced by soft touches, long gentle strokes. We both want what we can't have, we want this to last forever. This heat, this pleasure, this connection.

This being alive.


End file.
